I'm reading a Beryl Bainbridge book - 'Winter Garden'. I've read loads of her books, but not for ages and haven't read this one at all. I love her understated humour. The reader is often in on the joke even though the characters have no idea they are doing something funny. And she was an excellent observer of human behaviour.

One of her funniest books is Young Adolf which is based on the true story that Adolf Hitler, as a young man came to Liverpool to visit his brother and sister-in-law (who is an irish Catholic) in 1912.

Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a student and an artist, Adolf soon irritates his family beyond measure by his constant sponging and his tendency to get into serious trouble with the English. Surely this is a young man who will never amount to anything.

Bouncy Castle wrote:The great thing about Patterson is that his chapters are very short!

I do wonder why he collaborates with so many other authors, though.

Less of a collaboration, and more of a "I'm the bestselling author brand name, and you (partner) are a nobody, so in order to keep milking my cash cow I'll give you some general ideas and perhaps a rough plotline and maybe a bit of dialogue here and there but you'll do the all the writing and rewriting gruntwork in exchange for 40% of the profits.

Pterry himself has been doing these kinds of things for years. Sometimes the results are superb--like his collaboration with Neil Gaiman in Good Omens, which seemed to have 'equal voice' of Pterry and Gainman. Sometimes his collaborations with others just seems like he's tossing in a few ideas and letting someone else do the grunt work--asThe Long Earth, which seemed more like a Stephen Baxter book than a Pterry book in many ways. Then some books just look like he threw in some lower-shelf stuff to compliment the work done by others--like the not particularly engaging chapters he wrote for his part of the Science of DW books I'm not reading.

The worst is when an author whores out their concept to others with barely any involvement at all. Usually you know this has happened when the possessives start happening, i.e. "Frank Herbert's Dune" with some other nonentity writing crap.

Last edited by raisindot on Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.